question and maybe it isn’t.
“No,” she says. Before I can ask why, she adds, “I guess no one heard. He doesn’t have any neighbors yet.”
We both look at the walls to our left and to our right. The room feels impossibly small.
“I don’t know when it happened,” Coach says. “I don’t know anything.”
Thoughts come to me, of Will and his self-puzzled depths.
I feel a loss suddenly.
I can’t hold on to it long enough to figure out why, but suddenly, shamefully, I feel sorry for myself.
In that moment, though, she’s made a turn.
“Addy,” she says, voice faster now. “Where’s your car?”
“I don’t know,” I say. I can feel a bolting energy from her, her body inching toward the door.
It’s like she just showed me a triple toe touch back, three fast scissor kicks, landing, then springing back for the final back tuck. Her hands never touching the ground. Not once.
But something is niggling at me. Holding me back.
“Wait, Coach,” I say. “Where’s your car?”
“At the mechanic. Remember?” She is curt, like I’m her slowest student.
“So how did you get here?” I ask, walking over to her.
“Oh,” she says. “I took a cab. I snuck out of the house. Matt was asleep. He took two pills. I had to see Will. So I called a cab.” A pause between each sentence like reading flash cards. “But I couldn’t call a cab to take me back, could I?”
“No, Coach,” I say. “I guess you couldn’t.”
“And I can’t show up at home in a cab now,” she says, her voice speeding up again.
Zzzzt!
My phone.
Zzzzt!
But this time she is right next to me, and she is back to being Coach, her arm whipping out, her fingers hooking over my pocketed hand.
“What is that? Who’s calling?”
“No one’s calling,” I say, her hot fingers clamping at me, like when she pushes your body to make that jump, support that weight, the weight of five girls, effortlessly.
In an instant, it’s like I’m not in Will’s apartment but at practice, and in trouble.
“A text,” I say. “I get texts all the time.”
“In the middle of the night?” She jerks my wrist from my pocket and the phone rattles to the floor.
Mercifully, the battery flies out.
“Pick it up,” she says. “Goddammit, Addy.”
I start to bend down.
“Don’t touch anything,” she snaps, and I see one of my hands is almost resting on the shiny black lacquer of the table.
Rising, I look down at the tabletop and see my smudgy face reflected in it, black depthless eyes.
There’s nothing there, really.
“Addy, we have to go, we have to go,” Coach says, her voice grinding into me. “Get me out of here.”
Moments later, we dart across the parking lot, my sapphire Acura like a beacon.
We’re driving, the night vacant and starless, and the whole world is softly asleep, with furnaces purring and windows shut tight and the safety of people tucked inside with the warming knowledge of a tomorrow and a tomorrow after that of just such humming sameness.
The car windows down, the crystally cool on me, I imagine myself in that world, the one I know. I imagine myself curled in just such comforts, comforts so tight they could choke you. So tight they choke me always.
Oh, was there no happiness to be had the world over? There or here?
Here in this bleach-fogged car, she beside me, still holding her sneakers between her legs. Her fingers keep running around the tongue, her eyes thoughtfully, almost dreamily on the road.
I can’t fathom what she’s thinking.
Finally, as we’re turning down her street, Coach asks me to pull over two doors from her house.
“Roll the windows up,” she says. I do.
“Addy, it’s going to be fine,” she says. “Just forget about all this.”
I nod, my chin shaking from the cold, from the wretched loneliness of that drive, fifteen, twenty minutes in the car. She never said a word, seemed lost in some kind of moody reverie.
“You just need to go home and pretend it never happened,” she says. “Okay?”
When she gets out of the car, the waft of bleach from her shoes smacks me.
Unable to turn the ignition, I sit there.
Were I thinking straight, were I feeling the world made any sense at all, I might be driving to the police station, calling 911. Were I that kind of person.
Instead, I look at my cell. I need to text Beth back.
Fell asleep, be-yotch, I type. Some of us sleep.
Still sitting, I wait a minute for her reply. But my phone just lies there.
No Beth.
It should make